Great editorial on Nov. 13 (“Help businesses disrupted by rail,” Our View), and thank you for bringing attention to this dire situation. Here is our small local family business’ plight:
Soderholm Bus & Mobility is the only licensed bus and mobility van dealer in Hawaii serving the disabled community. We are located on Dillingham Boulevard across from the Blood Bank and catty-corner from the Oahu Community Correctional Center. Our business helps support 11 local households.
The last time contractor Nan Inc. started relocating utilities on Dillingham a few years ago, before it was shut down for lack of permits, it repeatedly blocked access to our lot, preventing our 80-plus-year-old customers from accessing our services for vans, ramps, lifts and hand controls. I, too, am disabled and was prevented multiple times from accessing the business my husband and I own.
We have been in business for 35 years, and four years ago bought a new lot on Mokauea Street to avoid the Dillingham rail mess. However, the city, despite the mayor’s best efforts, took nearly three years to give us building permits. Now we face huge increased construction costs due to inflation and high interest rates to finance our new building. We also have to wrangle with the bulky items and household rubbish that are continually dumped in front of our properties, being faced with city fines if we don’t.
Joey Manahan and other staff from the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) came by to assess our situation a couple of weeks ago. Nan did not come. It has to bury a high voltage and regular power line in our sidewalk. This will render half of our inventory parking spaces unusable and in high probability, will shut down our van sales lot for years.
We are not a restaurant. Sending out notices or discount coupons to dine won’t help. We were offered apologies for the “inconvenience” this will cause. Seriously? This is not just an inconvenience, this is our business, our life and the support for our employees’ families. A business doesn’t just bounce back from this type of disruption.
HART CEO Lori Kahikina says “it’s going to be painful.” Does she know the pain of a small business trying to pay a mortgage, or rent, or property taxes to the very city that’s threatening our business?
Does she understand the pain of how to budget so you can pay employees’ salaries for three years while undergoing this “inconvenience”? I suspect neither she, nor any of the others, understands the pain we are being told to endure.
Manahan said there were city funds to help mitigate the disruptions. This community intervention should have started years ago, not just a month before the digging and disruption starts!
Nan later had a noon virtual meeting where we couldn’t speak, and it had the option of ignoring our written questions or comments. The Nan representative said his company would shut down Dillingham with no access to business for “the duration of the project” — and even hoped for the Christmas present of no additional community meetings until after the first of the year.
Why can’t we return to in-person monthly evening meetings at Kalihi Kai Elementary? HART and Nan want to completely control the meetings. They want to ignore and mute the voices of the community and businesses they will be destroying.
Kahikina promised a new plan for the smooth finish of the rail. Now she says we must just tough out the next three years? She represents the classic government worker attitude that doesn’t understand small business or even care about us.
Soderholm Bus & Mobility will go out of business under the heavy unkind hand of Nan and HART, along with our unique services to the disabled community, if the Dillingham relocation process continues as planned. And they just don’t care.
Denise and Erik Soderholm are president and vice president, respectively, of Soderholm Bus & Mobility.
